Shards of the Dying Sun
by Finnimbrun
Summary: In the firefly summer, when the trees sway and drip, the sunset heats the clouds to pink-lavender and orange that burns through one end to the other, and Konan, with aching fingers, weaves the faux-flowers into Nagato's hair.
1. in a misty world

**Chapter 1: in a misty world**

* * *

**Title:** Shards of the dying sun.**  
Genre:** Angst/tragedy + romance + general.**  
Characters/Pairing:** Nagato, Yahiko, Konan. Pain (Nagato) x Konan. Eventually to be conducted in Yahiko's body, too.**  
Rating:** R (M).**  
Warnings:** Violence and sexuality. The latter is likely to get more explicit in the upcoming segments, 'cause that's how I like it. Actually, the former will get more explicit in the upcoming section, as well, and if you're familiar with the canon story for Yahiko, Nagato, and Konan, then you should know precisely why this is. In any case, consider yourself warned. :)**  
Summary:** So it's close to this: there are three. One boy knows himself, and is interested in himself, and everything. The other boy has lost himself, and does not know who he is. The girl is outside of herself, in the middle, and draws her hopes from the boy who knows himself and draws her sense of purpose, individually, from helping the boy who does not. They are balanced, during this time. Perhaps more balanced than they could understand. It's this which allows them to live.**  
Disclaimer:** Don't own Naruto. I really wish I owned Pain and Konan, though, just so I could save them from the fail that canon ultimately beset upon them.

+ a big thank-you to my friends: Anat_Astarte (LJ), Herongale, fonsetorigo (LJ), and lady_tigerfish (LJ), who listened to me whine about this, and looked over it some in advance. Cheers!

* * *

"Once upon a time," let's say.

Once upon a time, because this is how the story is supposed to begin.

Once upon a time, there's a girl. She's sitting in her bedroom, wrestling with the hair which Mommy just cut for her. And this girl - whose hair by the way is a shade you've never thought hair would be before, and whose eyes are bright in the light of the stars because the sky has no rain in it – yanks the teeth of the comb through, cuts and tears the strands as she does so, because she's not careful, and so soon all of her hair (which is blue, yes, blue hair like the flowers that the rain has drowned) breaks at the ends and is short and shorn and jagged.

She gives up on her hair, eventually, this girl does. At least for now.

She's five, and knows mostly this: today her mother has shown her how to press flowers – how to tuck the folds so she can take the little blue sheets and re-make what the rain has destroyed: re-make it for herself. And on the evening she gives up on her hair, this girl begins to tuck and fold, forming the flowers to sit on her windowsill, under the stars, to bring back what the rain has taken away.

A year ago, flowers bloomed under her window.

Now, there's mud.

Within three days, Mommy and Daddy are gone, and so is the house, and the window, the bed, the starlight, and the comb with the sharp teeth.

The flowers, too.

Now, there's mud.

The rest, let's say, is "once upon a time".

* * *

Konan has no interest in herself.

She's too young to know, but the truth is, it's gone.

She loses it, somewhere, if it was ever there. She is six years old and has lost a lot of things, so maybe that's where it went.

After her parents went outside one day and didn't come back, she leaves everything behind, as she's been left behind, and she's sitting outside one day and huddling down against the wet cold, when she meets a boy. The boy looks like someone who is very interested in himself. He looks like someone who knows where he wants to go, though she's too young to really think of him that way. She just knows he looks "nice", and he smiles at her.

"Hi," she says, and she's shaking with hunger and fatigue.

"C'mon," the boy says, and gets her back to a cave, where everything is so dark; she almost falls down inside. She's been seeing visions of her parents flitting around this dead land, but when she chases them, they disappear into the rain that's drowning her. Her legs aren't working right. The boy says a thing like: "Wow, I can't believe you're not crying."

(Though she didn't know she wasn't.)

He lights an oil lamp, and he gives her bread and cold soup. Sometime later, she stops shaking a little.

"Being out there alone is dangerous," the boy says, and wags a finger.

She blinks away the rain in her eyes and nods.

"You could get killed," he says, and she nods to that, too.

"Jeez, you sure don't say much. What's tha matter with you? How long were you out there in that rain like that, with no food? Man."

"I don't know," she says.

"Well, okay. Eat up."

He's someone who prods a lot, which is how she thinks of him, really, but that's all right, because she needs to be prodded to live right now. If no one were pushing her, she knows – even at that age, she knows – that she would've died down in the dirt, under the pouring sky.

* * *

It is a horrible place. It honestly is.

Still, she likes to go for walks. Yahiko tells her it's risky, that she shouldn't, but he doesn't try to stop her. He's busy doing what he does, which is going off to steal and keeping watch over the supplies he's collected – the crates and bags and their contents.

Konan can hear the background noise of battle; exploding tags and soldiers' screams, and she's used to them, now, and she's hungry a lot of the time. Her stomach gets sore, and she gets accustomed to this. It swells and roils and keeps her awake sometimes with the pain. But she makes it through from day to day, which is more than many, after all.

There are all these half-sunken buildings that look like the corpses of houses. They jut out of the ground, and she wonders in passing who might have lived there, and how they might have lived, and where they've all gone. Gone, gone. Her head is always like that: full of flowers and things that are gone, somewhere else in some better or quieter place. So sometimes, she can't even hear the sounds of those things dying in the near distance.

She's out walking like this one day when she finds the second person who will be her life.

Konan is drawn to Nagato because he's someone else who has lost himself out there somewhere.

She doesn't make that connection. She just knows he looks hungry and sad. So she gives him some of her bread, and he looks at her blearily.

He's even more lost than she is, actually. Konan is someone with no interest in her person (that she does not yet know), but Nagato is someone without himself; someone shaken through, reduced to pieces and tatters. She can't even see his eyes under that red hair, and she wants to brush her hand across his forehead for a better look.

When his dog is licking his fingertips to catch the crumbs, Konan watches the way he tilts his head and looks confused, like every thought is some kind of question, and he can't understand the world.

"Are you sure?" he had asked her.

"Is it okay?"

"Where are we going?"

The dog is a kind of life Nagato is trying to take care of, and Nagato becomes a life Konan tries to take care of. She takes him back to the cave, with her hand tentatively pushing his back and shoulder, and she grabs him when he stumbles.

So it's close to this: there are three. One boy knows himself, and is interested in himself, and everything. The other boy has lost himself, and does not know who he is. The girl is outside of herself, in the middle, and draws her hopes from the boy who knows himself and draws her sense of purpose, individually, from helping the boy who does not. They are balanced, during this time. Perhaps more balanced than they could understand.

It's this which allows them to live.

And they do live, for a while.

The dog does not. It passes on, as most things do, and Konan swipes the dirty tears tracks from Nagato's round cheeks. Yahiko isn't always with them. He's often up ahead, such as he is when their pet dies. He's in a stronger place, Konan knows, and Nagato knows it, too. He's not like them. He's different. They all three care for one another, but Yahiko is just -

He's not bleeding the way they are. Nagato's arms are full of the still-hot body of fur and blood - twitching and thrashing with the aftershocks of dying nerves and muscles, and Konan just looks at him, and inside her, a string tugs like: that's us. That's us in your arms. Or maybe it's you, and I'm in you.

The dog was theirs. Nagato is Konan's. Nagato and Konan are Yahiko's. This is the order, and they know it in the instinctive, primal way that a salmon knows which way to swim and when. They are Yahiko's. Nagato is Konan's. He's her charge. She found him. She dries his face. She lifts him up, as Yahiko lifted her up. And he murmurs _thanks_. Almost unheard.

And though hers is blue like the flowers she wants to re-make for this land and cannot, and his is red as the blood still inside him and filling his body, even their hair is the same: hacked poorly by parents who went on to disappear, ripped to split ends by the teeth of a comb, wetly tickling their necks and shoulders.

Nagato bites down on the insides of his cheeks and sucks in his breath and chokes on his sobs, and Konan stands with him, and knows she always will.

* * *

Nagato is aware, on some level, that he has no self, but he is six, and so he wouldn't quite put it like that.

Their self-perceptions are more of a nagging feeling, at that age (but even later, they never know themselves, and that's why - ), but Nagato was someone's child, and now he's not. And it's this feeling of being lost that haunts him when he looks through the wastelands; it's living as garbage, thrown away and meaningless.

War is chaos. War is emptiness and desolation and the shuddering ground splashing mud into his mouth, and if you're left behind, then that's what you are: left behind. Like there was no purpose to even being born.

His country is being torn apart, and he doesn't completely understand.

He wants to understand, though. He wants to understand why there's dirt on his hands from where he has been making mounds for the bodies of his parents. He wants to know how to get rid of the ugly, toxic blackness that's coursing through him and churning in his gut, trickling in his veins. Like the rain is washing the mud up into him; it's circulating, and he wants it out.

He wants a tonic of an answer: clean enough to fit on the line of a page.

_Give me a word,_ he prays to the emptiness, as the war thunders on around him.

She saves him, like an angel, and takes him to Yahiko, who gives him -

Not an answer, no. But the path to an answer.

Nagato recognizes in this other boy someone who can find answers. Yahiko isn't like him. He's not always asking questions. He doesn't need questions. His parents are dead, too, but he's going to live on, he says. He's going to live on, and that's that.

Nagato wishes he could satisfy himself that easily. If only he could say it, and think it, and have that be the end.

"I'm going to be the god of this world," Yahiko says in frustration.

And he says it with conviction, so Nagato watches in awe.

And maybe for a moment, that ugly feeling lessens.

Maybe, he thinks -

Nagato does not bury the dog. He leaves it on the ground. There's not time for a burial. Yahiko has already gone ahead. Nagato hears, vaguely, as he's told to stop crying, and Konan is standing back with him – alongside him. They look up as their friend makes another speech, all the while knowing, painfully, that they _aren't on that level_.

He's always somewhere they're not, but that's all right. They have him, and maybe he can be a sort of portal to that other place: so they can look inside at this world they cannot actually touch.

It's Yahiko, after all, who brings them to the ninja from Konoha.

* * *

Konan's first thought, when she sees Nagato and Yahiko on the ground that day, is that Nagato isn't hers, anymore.

Her body almost freezes up, but instead she runs to him, helps him while Jiraiya helps Yahiko, but her heart is thudding thudding thudding, saying _he's not mine anymore_, because he's not his own anymore, either. He's someone else that day – that day he's on the ground, under the storm. He doesn't look at her with his eyes covered by the curtain of his hair; doesn't spit the sludge from his lips.

Nagato is a thousand miles away, lost to some world of pain and confusion, far beyond this ravaged country, and even after they've been tucked into their sleeping bags, Konan can feel him wandering away.

She rolls over, keeping her eyes squeezed shut tightly, counting the chirps of the crickets in the dying night. The rustle of movement accompanies Nagato's departure; his feet swish-swishing on the tatami mats – the sliding of the door and the howling wind that fills the room like the moans of their lost parents calling out to them, and Konan looks at Yahiko.

Thinks: Please, please. Don't go, where I can't follow.

Where Nagato is going.

* * *

The next three years are like the sunshine.

Like the years before the world fell down, when maybe Konan had interest in herself and maybe Nagato had a self to have interest in. Yahiko is the same as ever, because he can be.

Konan never tells her sensei that she is not so enamoured with ninjutsu, but she thinks he may know.

Konan likes rain that falls when the sun is shining and the sky is almost cloudless – rare as it is - and Konan likes the oranges their sensei cuts for them; she likes to dance in circles, barefooted, on the mats. She likes to help with the dishes, because it gives her something purposeful to put energy towards, and she can look outside the window and watch Yahiko and Nagato sparring, then Yahiko wielding his stick at insect nests while Nagato crouches to the damp earth and touches the back of his hand to some little life that's dying, some tiny plant.

In his eyes are rings. Circles.

His eyes go on forever.

Nagato looks at her wonderingly when she gives him a flower to replace the one he watched die, but in this land, they are always watching the death of some small life; some dog or some plant. The frogs are singing, sobbing in the marshes. In the firefly summer, when the trees sway and drip, the sunset heats the clouds to pink-lavender and orange that burns through one end to the other, and Konan, with aching fingers, weaves the faux-flowers into Nagato's hair – unlike Yahiko's, which is too resistant. And he wouldn't let her, anyway.

"I think he's going to leave, soon," Nagato says, and picks at a dandelion.

"Sensei?"

"Yeah."

Konan hesitates. Continues braiding in the flowers. "What do you two talk about when you go off together?"

He shifts, so she feels the lie:

"Nothing."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Nothing important."

"Okay," Konan concedes.

"I have to stop crying."

And this time, she is the one who shifts. Pulls her fingers from his hair. They hurt from forming hand signs all day. The joints are stiff from patterns and motions she's been unused to, and she does not think she will ever get used to this violence on her body, on any body. It's somehow unnatural. This is why Konan does not like ninjutsu.

She shakes her hand, so the little red strands clinging like wisps to her fingertips fall away and descend to the ground.

She doesn't say: _I don't think you should._

Not then, or ever.

Though maybe she should have, she will think someday.

* * *

The world of puppy smiles in the land of death becomes another place. Their sensei is from a different world, and he brings them a sliver of this world, and there is clothing warm on a line and him sitting at the table, nodding and scrawling notes with his leaking pen. There's food now - fish caught from the nearby rivers, and cooked fowl, though the latter makes Konan's stomach ache sometimes. They're growing stronger. So much stronger, says Jiraiya-sensei. And it won't be long, they all know.

Before, they were children in a land not made for children, and now they are children in a universe that opens itself to them – that gives them the breath to gust from their lungs as they chase each other around the tall weeds behind the house they occupy. Someone else's house, once. Someone gone, gone, gone.

Yahiko has plans, and Nagato disappears with Jiraiya-sensei sometimes, and Konan knows there's some bond between them, and she knows Nagato is slipping from her even when he's with her. There's someone inside of Nagato whom she doesn't know; a stranger locked in his forever-eyes.

Sometimes Nagato sinks in himself when the three of them are sitting outside on the porch, eating berries, and their teeth are stained black and blue, and Nagato's head begins to hang. And Yahiko hits him on the back and says something that Konan knows is meant to help.

Nagato is no longer always sinking. Sometimes he's far off, reading or thinking. He's not crying so much anymore. He barely cries at all, though his eyes refuse to smile.

And maybe a smile is too much for eyes like those.

The truth is, there's one Yahiko and one Konan, but sometimes there are many Nagatos. Nagato the crying, and Nagato the serene and pensive, and Nagato who is made of a darker substance still. Nagato alone, walking and dragging his sandals through the red-brown of the earth with the line of the horizon glowing against him. Nagato who is never quite satisfied.

Who is hers, hers, hers - who was hers until the day when she found him on the ground and knew what was growing inside.

Nagato's light is the brightest she's known, and she's attracted to it like the moths to their oil lamps, but sometimes he lives like an eclipse unto himself.

Konan wants to know his mind, and does, on the night they're at the edge of the forest, away from their encampment, with the bonfire light blazing to the treetops. She captures his mind with her lips to his lips and her hands in his hands, brushing over the calluses where he's held the kunai knives.

It's like waking up into a dream; those first kisses, and their hot small bodies in the dry night on the eve of autumn, with squirms and pink cheeks and an unsatisfied need itching, burning between them.

* * *

In two days, their sensei leaves.

And Konan envies the part of Nagato he takes with him, off to the land beyond the mountain peaks.

It's actually Yahiko who cries.

His features drag themselves down into a soggy mess of sobs, puddling over the love he had for that man. Yahiko loves loudly, with all of himself, and Konan puts her arms around him and pats his shoulders. _It's okay,_ she says. _It's okay. Yahiko, you can't keep crying, forever._

When Nagato cried, it was because he was incomplete, but when Yahiko cries, it's because he's whole.

And yet something has changed. Konan can feel it when they return to their little house, when they slide the door open, and Nagato disappears from them.

As he does more and more often now.

Nagato no longer needs them in the same way.

Because Nagato has killed.

Because Nagato has gone to a place where neither of them could follow, into the forever of his eyes, beyond the mountains, when the dead painted his fingers red and the rain cleansed him again.

Nagato lives in a land of shadow and death, one with the war, and on some higher level.

And then Nagato lives with them.

Come, come.

You must be so lonely, being God.

* * *

Slum children can make love.

Or mate, perhaps. War children: dropped out of mothers now dried up and dead, their footprints growing with age as their careers track a history through the farmlands, with their umbilical cords cut off from their sources - yet always around their necks like nooses dragging them from womb to tomb. Wild children, tamed for three years. They surge with a life unlike that possessed by the children of nobility, in cities not sinking, against sunsets not burnt and blazing.

It's in the sorghum that they set their bodies down and curl their toes to the rhythms that create life – that affirm life.

It's been five years since sensei left, and the organization has just begun. It's sprung up wild and tangled from Yahiko's imagination, and from his persuasive powers, as he's found and rallied other children like themselves. He was always good at that.

Yahiko is Konan's brother, or he may as well be. They were meant to be siblings. They share similar eyes, and a birth date, and when he teases her, and Nagato, it's like. She is glad they are his.

Konan feels bolder - with a flower in her bobbed hair that she's cut again today (a soldier's cut), the dark lines she's smeared across her eyelids, and roughspun cloth hiding the form she's been shaping in her teenage years.

Konan is sprouting out in directions she never knew she could, and it's been embarrassing and painful. Yahiko pointed out her chest, once. Went so far as to poke it.

Konan felt herself turn a shade of pink which didn't match her colours.

Coming into yourself is difficult, when there's been no interest there for years.

It's an older woman with sun-cracked skin and tied-up hair – one of the _organization_ - who shows Konan what to do for herself each month, and what more central use for her paper jutsu there may be. It's miserable, and Konan can't say why, but it makes her feel like filth.

It makes her feel like filth when this woman says, "The world will never listen to you. This is the path we walk. We wear the mask. People like us."

Women, she doesn't say.

"Yahiko and Nagato will listen to me. They always have," Konan answers.

"I pray that you're right, and the days are changing," the woman murmurs. Tips her rice hat, and leaves.

Konan forgets about that conversation, and many others. The sorghum grows tall and catches the wind. Sings its flute melody over her skin; goose prickles on her arms - and eating dates in the evening, in the tent. Kicking the rain water from her boots and standing at the curtain of their newest residence, where business is conducted. She watches the clouds beyond the curtain and wishes the limits of the human imagination and the physical space could be less than they are, such that she could fashion origami castles for herself. And for Nagato, and Yahiko.

It's one evening when the rain has turned the sky prismatic with moisture. The moon is plump and the clouds are an inviting halo, and Konan thinks, she really thinks, if she believed in God -

Nagato is with her, and they've been into the _sake_, and Yahiko is negotiating, and he's told them to wait for a short time, and they have nothing to do but wait, so Konan asks, "Why did you reject leadership?"

His breath is hot and sharp and sparked with alcohol. "I'm not meant to be a leader."

"I see potential."

It's hardly a whisper.

Pause. "He would've wanted it, anyway. There's no reason to make a scene."

"He offered it to you."

"But he would've wanted it."

Konan knows he's right about that point.

"And I don't have to lead to utilize my ninjutsu," he adds. "So it doesn't really matter. You know he really would've wanted to be our leader. It's best this way."

"I want him to be happy, too," Konan replies. Swallows another shot. The burn goes down her throat. "Both of you, more than anything. I just don't want you to..."

Falters.

"Underestimate yourself. That's all."

He _hm_s. "I don't, really. Not anymore."

She can't tell if she thinks he's lying. Maybe he's not. Her brain is fogged and her lips are tingling and she with her hooded eyes regards him against their firefly backdrop. He'll probably always be a quiet and retiring person, just as she is. He'll probably always be someone whose Self isn't all there; pieces cracked or missing. It's good that they have Yahiko.

"I think we're drunk," she admits.

"Tipsy," he corrects.

"All right. Touch me."

"What?"

Doesn't even sound like a question. More like: "What."

And she giggles. Nearly snorts.

It's because her breasts are heavy and swollen and aching under the roughspun cloth, which is suffocating her with scratchy hotness, and right now it's rubbing too hard against her nipples and arousing her even more – now, when her body has changed in all these ways, and she's foggy, and her sensitivity is at its peak. But Konan can't quite articulate this. So she half-closes her eyes and says, "Just, please."

She begins to lift her robe; he reaches out, as if to halt her, but then he twists the fabric in his hand for a moment and lets go. Reaches closer.

His fingernails scrape through the hot sweat running across her tight abdomen.

Konan jerks the _sack_ (it may as well be) over her head and strips away the makeshift undergarments, letting all of herself fall out.

They go down in the sorghum, and clothes vanish in stages, or not at all, until their lips and tongues fumble over one another, and there's all that hot metallic taste, and the taste of _sake_, and the taste of rain: when they can make their mouths fit together, lock like jigsaw puzzles clumsily catching.

Their hitai-ate don't even come off; their foreheads just clink against one another, and their windburnt noses nuzzle like a prayer said in silence, in unison.

Her breasts fill his hands. _Oh - _and her belly corkscrews. Sore; pleasure-pain from the way he cups them, and massages the buds of nipples.

The lamps filter through the haze of rain and Nagato's breaths gust over the sound of the wind, and his hair tickles her face as she moans softly at the feel of the familiar tightness deep inside; in her belly and chest and between her legs, and she moans sweetly, plaintively, for him to continue – continue please. Please.

Slum children can make love. Can rut – maybe more crudely speaking – in the fields, in the tangle of heady desire and the absence of restraint, or society. If they can survive to mate, they will mate to survive. And so the actual sex is short, because he comes too soon and she doesn't come at all (until afterwards, when she touches herself and finds the sufficient strokes to clench and unclench the muscles that have frozen and gone rigid in her arousal).

But what she mostly remembers is how coiled her body can become, and how hard it can spasm, and how his breaths taste in her own mouth, feel in her own throat. Konan sucks her fingertips and finds the flavour of herself, and _sake_, and the rinds of crisps from dinner crumbled powder-fine across her nails. She remembers how her paper flower droops over her eyelid and sags, how her hair is disheveled and needs combing like you wouldn't believe, but above all there, there's this feeling of weightlessness.

It's different from how she's felt all her life, having no interest in herself.

It's as if she's up in the place with the stars, fallen off the shore, off the waterfront - where the line of the sky meets the land, where the water ends, and there is only clarity, pink and orange and purple and black.

As if all the colours of her native country have washed through her. Her spirit drinks them to the core.

Like the thrum of a string song running through her veins and tickling her stomach, as Nagato kisses her shoulders and neck and back, then massages her muscles in semi-circles, squeezes until she takes his long fingers and mouths the sweat away.

Konan walks back to their tents when the stars are out fully - with lovely bruise-bites on her neck and upper arms. On her breasts, teeth-flowers blossom from where the throbbing skin was sucked.

She remembers the sensations that accompanied these decorations, every one, and pockets each away inside folds of memories. Covers herself up with the high-collared robe. Hides every inch.

And sleeps.

* * *

"All right, you jerks - " Yahiko says, and drags Nagato forward a bit by the wrist, and then runs to Konan, who is crouching behind the makeshift hill, on the other side of which is a trench. " - hey, wait."

She looks behind herself and swipes a handful of crusted over dirt off her boot heel.

"Hey, Konan, stop that! You're not even paying attention."

He fists her bun and gives it a yank.

"_Yahiko_," she growls (in as much as Konan ever _growls_), "you stop it. We're not ten anymore, and I'm paying perfect attention. What is it that you want?"

"You spend more time worrying about your hair and makeup and clothing than you do worrying about our mission," he tells her, and sounds a little bemused. "Not scolding. Just, you know. You do."

And it's a kind of strange moment. A kind of surreal moment. You might refer to it as an "epiphany", if you were so inclined. But an epiphany of what?

Konan looks up, looks at the back of her friend's head, where he's tying his hitai-ate, and tufts of orange-red hair flatten under it.

It's another of those moments: a moment where she feels there's something she's thinking or meant to say that she can't quite capture with her mouth or mind. "_Our" mission?_ Our mission?

_It's never been our mission, Yahiko._

Her eyes shift toward Nagato, who is looking downward, somewhere off in thought.

It's been everyone else's mission, Konan realizes.

_Everyone's but mine._

And this, for all that it hits her, is a frightening thought. And maybe she's not accepted it yet, or allowed herself to. Because if it's not her mission, she thinks, then what is _her_ mission?

Not her hair or her makeup or her clothing, as he suggested.

She watches Yahiko as he reviews the map for where they're going now, and she swallows hard.

Not her appearance in any respect, no (because she has no interest in herself). He was all wrong about that. _You were all wrong, Yahiko_ – she wants to say. _That's just something I do to pass the time._

Not her origami, though it's important to her. It's important to her for a reason – one that she's never thought Yahiko understood, and when she really lets herself _think_ about how he doesn't understand, she aches in some dull sense: a throb all over.

(And Konan knows she wants to believe that Nagato is different, and different from most boys she's met, and that he understands - but maybe he doesn't, either.)

Not those things. Not any of those things are her life. Her priorities.

"All right," Yahiko says, and sucks in a breath. "I need you guys to listen carefully, because here's what we're going to do."

Konan rises, slowly, and she moves to stand behind him, and Nagato moves to stand behind him; they really don't look at one another, now, and it's noon and the sun is sweltering – drying up all the mud, which is now cracking underfoot. And when Yahiko looks forward, the sun is on his face, burning sweat trails down his temples.

Konan can only see his expression from the side, but she thinks his face is still too youthful to wear such a serious expression. It doesn't fit him well.

"And Konan, I have a very important role in our mission for you," he adds.

Folds the map, and puts it away.

"Our mission", again.

_My mission is just you two, Yahiko,_ she doesn't say.

Because maybe it would sound frivolous, to him. To them. Like her looks, or origami, her lack of interest in jutsu, or herself. Frivolous – most pursuits are – when contrasted against the need to bring peace to a warring country.

Paper drops from around her wrist, from out of the sleeves of her cloak. She crushes it underfoot.

"We're going to see Hanzou now," Yahiko says, more solemnly than he's ever said anything.

Konan nods, and Nagato nods. And their footsteps are loud on the broken ground.

It's been dry lately - too dry for the season, but they all know the rains will return.

And soon, very soon, the sky opens, again.

* * *

It's raining when they get there.

Raining harder than it has in days – weeks, even – enough to earn Rain Country its name. Nagato stands among the puddles and looks up. It's all streaming down his face. Plastering his hair to his skin.

Konan stands beside him with her jaw clenched, and thinks she must look a perfect warrior. The robe hides her body. The metal of the kunai knives is digging into her sides and hips. As she stands there, Konan remembers the techniques her sensei taught her; they rush into her mind in whorls of paper shuriken. She's ready. She's ready. She can do it, if need be. If he – if anyone – tries to hurt them -

She can kill. She is ready to kill.

Hanzou shakes Yahiko's hand. The meeting continues.

Here's the agreement: Hanzou will give them supplies if they go on ahead, but a vast bulk of their group is missing.

Yahiko apparently expected this.

"I'm taking Nagato with me. You both know why," he murmurs, with a slight conspiratorial glance at the other boy.

Yes, they know why. Presumably, no one else knows about the rinnegan, and Yahiko, as their leader, stands to be in a perilous situation. If he's going out alone, he might get attacked. He'll need back-up. Nagato will be his bodyguard. They've already gone over the plan. Konan knows her part of it.

"Take care, little sister," Yahiko says. He sounds as optimistic as ever, but there's a _bite_ of something in his voice. Tension. Worry. Yet his tone sing-songs over such trifles, and he slaps Konan's back. Gives her shoulders a stroke. Sloppily kisses her cheek with a fierceness which takes her aback. "I'm sure you'll be fine. I trust you."

"Jeez, Yahiko. Jeez. I told you not to call me that," she teases, as they always do. "We have the same birthday. I'm not your little anything."

Then more seriously: "You don't have to talk that way, though, Yahiko. Really. It's not like I'll never see you again."

Yahiko just kind of smiles in that way he does, and yanks Konan's bun – like usual, and like usual, she says, "Cut it out!"

Of course, she doesn't yell it very loudly, because half their people are nearby.

These motions are like a rehearsal between the two of them, now (three, when Yahiko can involve Nagato more in his side of things); it's practiced and expected. A sort of dance: step-step, the kind of things only friends and siblings and faux-siblings can understand. Yahiko can't not give them a hard time. They can't not respond according to what the designated response is supposed to be: mock-indignation, in the majority of such cases.

These are the precious pieces of their childhood that they carry with them even now that they are the leaders of a rebel faction so strong it has caused Hanzou to take notice.

They need their pieces. And they need Yahiko.

He's never mentioned it, but Konan knows (and Nagato probably knows, but he's never mentioned it, either) Yahiko must be aware that she and Nagato have been going out to the fields together, and visiting one another's tents. Lounging about in their quiet appreciation of things. They've made no effort to _hide_ these goings-on, though they are not given to being demonstrative in front of others - and indeed, even as Yahiko says his enthusiastic goodbye, Nagato stands aside looking pensive, and his own departure is silent.

But Yahiko is too keen on them both not to grasp what's been happening for a while now, though maybe he tries to unsee it.

Maybe it weirds him out, thinking of them like that. Nagato, his partner in crime, and little sister?

But it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter, because there are so many more important things in this world than kids messing around.

Though in the end, they were really nothing more.

* * *

**== part one** of a fic I have been working on for a few days, since I was disappointed with chapter 449, and hoped to write my own take on Nagato(Pain)/Konan; I'm simply hoping to embellish/fix the canon story, and add in my own bits. To that end, a good bit of material is being re-told here. I hope that's not too off-putting.

my nods: I don't write in the hopes of capturing any particular form of literary style, but I always think some modernist works are filtering through my mind a little. _Cane_, by Jean Toomer, kept filling my thoughts as I sought to describe the scenery. The bit about "slum children making love" v. how more noble kids do it I penned with Nabokov in mind (Humbert Humbert's laments at the beginning of _Lolita_), and Konan as a girl with no interest in herself was somewhat inspired by Milkman Dead, the protagonist of Toni Morrison's _Song of Solomon_, who is described as having lost all interest in himself. There are also little bits of T.S. Eliot-inspired moments in this piece, but they'll probably become more apparent in the next part.

(Which is not to say I try to make my work even remotely resemble the works of any of the aforementioned authors - not that I even could if I desired to do so - only that little lines or stylistic flourishes or ideas get trapped in my head and play like records.)

I wrote most of this chapter to "Redemption", by Conjure One (great song to write to) and "Grey Street", by Dave Matthews Band, which ends up being a very Konan-appropriate tune. :)


	2. pick up the pieces

**Chapter 2: pick up the pieces**

* * *

**Title:** Shards of the dying sun.**  
Genre:** Angst/tragedy + romance + general.**  
Characters/Pairing:** Nagato, Yahiko, Konan. Pain (Nagato) x Konan. Eventually to be conducted in Yahiko's body, too.**  
Rating:** R (M).**  
Warnings:** Violence and sexuality. The latter is likely to get more explicit in the upcoming segments, 'cause that's how I like it. Actually, the former will get more explicit in the upcoming section, as well, and if you're familiar with the canon story for Yahiko, Nagato, and Konan, then you should know precisely why this is. In any case, consider yourself warned. :)**  
Summary:** So it's close to this: there are three. One boy knows himself, and is interested in himself, and everything. The other boy has lost himself, and does not know who he is. The girl is outside of herself, in the middle, and draws her hopes from the boy who knows himself and draws her sense of purpose, individually, from helping the boy who does not. They are balanced, during this time. Perhaps more balanced than they could understand. It's this which allows them to live.**  
Disclaimer:** Don't own Naruto. I really wish I owned Pain and Konan, though, just so I could save them from the fail that canon ultimately beset upon them.

+ a big thank-you to Lily (fonsetorigo on LJ) for looking over this chapter as I was writing it.

* * *

Konan leads their group ahead.

The rain sluices her cheekbones. Wets her lips.

They are rumbling behind her, some as young as herself. Some younger.

She feels as if she's all bones – all bones and thick joints; wood and stiff jerky. The human is bleached away in war, in a mission. It's a lesson she learns better in the coming years, but this is her first acquaintance with a truism: in battle, when leading a charge, you are not a woman. You are not a person. You are a machine.

What you love doesn't matter. What you feel, in any respect, does not matter. If you hurt, it's all the same. If you bleed, or if you die, the war goes on.

So your face forgets that it once learned how to smile, because smiles are irrelevant. They have no place here.

They march ahead, and she, with care, keeps her boots from catching in the rocky soil.

This is, of course, her home, where she's lived all of her life, and someday, it is likely to be her grave: the hills and flatlands and craggy plateaus of the Rain Country, where the sky cried most of the land's vegetation away, and the industrialization of Amegakure proper bled the turf until it became this: a wet desert.

Far away, now, from the sorghum fields.

* * *

Nagato actually thinks it will all change today.

He's dreamed of this for a while, especially after nights of too much drink.

Yahiko can make it happen. He's always been someone who can make things happen, almost as if by will alone, since his is a powerful and forceful will.

They've never been in the city of _Amegakure no Sato_ proper; street rats don't go there, but on this day, the doors will open for them.

"Stop looking so glassy-eyed," Yahiko says, and shuffles along ahead. "You need to keep your mind on this mission."

Nagato mumbles something like an apology.

"No, it's okay. But they're not here. Damn it."

"Do we keep going, then?"

Yahiko breathes out hard and puts his hands on his sides. "Maybe it's time we went ahead and found Konan and the others."

He looks, Nagato thinks, like someone who has a bad feeling about the situation. His face scrunches up, and his jaw hangs and his lip juts, because Yahiko's lip was always very, very good at jutting.

"Yeah, okay. They're not here. They're not here. Whe-ew. Okay."

"Yahiko?"

"Hey! Don't start. Don't get me all worried, okay?" he replies, like someone whose composure is about to come crumbling down. "It's fine. Let's just go back and find Konan, and everyone else."

_It's fine; I'm sure it's fine,_ he keeps saying – like if he says it enough, it'll be embedded into their reality as the truth. _We're fine. Let's just keep going. Let's just not think about it too much._

Let's not worry ourselves.

But Nagato is not worried, because Nagato is not thinking in such terms; he's thinking, rather, of the sensation of that place he's visited before. Those dark doors – that other world. That other person looking out from his eyes. (His eyes, his eyes, his eyes.) And he remembers what Jiraiya-sensei told him, but -

But.

Butbutbutbutbutbutbut.

"What does it feel like?" Yahiko asks, when he catches up with Nagato, and throws his arm around his shoulder, and his teeth are chattering from the rain. Winter is coming, soon. "Eh?"

Nagato pushes his wet hair back from his eyes, and looks at him sincerely, and asks, of course: _What does _what _feel like?_

And Yahiko just shakes his head and laughs, like the answer is obvious, and they keep walking together, wearily, as if the world isn't maybe crashing down somewhere. As if they're not on the edge of everything they've always wanted. Everything Nagato has ever really wanted.

As if a lifetime of hopes held with bated breath aren't about to make his legs collapse.

And finally, Yahiko answers:

"Being an adult."

It really was the day when everything changed.

* * *

Konan is bending over to massage a knot from her cramping legs when she feels the cool press of the blade at her throat.

She opens her mouth.

_You know that you're the two most important people in my life -_

he's written.

_I wish I didn't get the sense that I'm about to fail you._

"What are you doing - ?" she gasps out, and feels immediately foolish.

Boot to the mid-back, heel pressing in, and she crashes to the ground.

Splits her lip. Tastes bloody rock, mud, and rainwater.

* * *

Nagato knows – in some way, on some level – that he's not right.

He loved his parents, as most children love, and when he lost them – when he buried them with his little hands – he entered a new world (one of starvation and wandering and perpetual what-ifs), but he thinks, sometimes, that there's something which died with them. Some capacity to be human, or normal, or proper. It's like an injury inside him: a pain, which has been filled with pus and toxic, and which is now cancerous and swelling.

And not even hearing that his eyes are descended from a legend makes it feel any better.

If anything, it makes it worse: his eyes didn't save _them_, did they?

It was Yahiko's dream he took, because he had no dreams of his own.

And he loves Yahiko, and he loves Konan, but even his love feels shaded.

Like maybe he's afraid to get too close, or else he'll _infect_ them with this disease, too.

But they love him. They do, and really, more than anything – some days more, even, than his dream of peace – he just wants to love them back, wholly and utterly, and it frightens him, the intensity for which he thinks he could love and need them, and the degree to which it makes his chest thud and tighten and _ache_.

Because he could be hurt all over again.

Because gods weren't ever meant to be human.

Because being human is harder, still.

* * *

The ropes go around her wrists.

Loop, loop, loop.

And she, with her nose scraping the ground, knows her power has been taken away.

Knows she's failed them.

And a man's hot breath is near her ear, and a man's rasping, grating voice – twisted by some strange device – a sick mechanical lullaby, poisonous, and Konan thinks she could almost, just almost, suffocate in the muck.

"You make it all too easy," he says. "You're no shinobi, at all."

She remembers, in a flash, her hatred of the violence to her body – to other bodies – and how unnatural it's always felt, and she thinks with remorse that he's right. He's right, and she's failed them. Yahiko and Nagato – she's -

_It wasn't important enough to me,_ she knows, suddenly.

Her hot tears mingle with the rain.

She wanted it to be important enough, because they always were important enough to her.

It is the first time – though certainly not the last – she learns that loving someone is not sufficient.

It will never be sufficient.

* * *

It will never be sufficient, Nagato is certain, when he looks up and sees the hemp chewing her arms.

"Damn it," someone who must be Yahiko says beside him.

The rain muffles and distorts the words, and their exhalations. They've been running, so everything out of their lungs is hard and harsh and makes them almost double over.

But all Nagato can see, up on the precipice, is the green of her eyes.

Which were too bright for this place.

* * *

_You've done things I haven't._

This is what Yahiko said.

_You've killed. You've._

He sighed.

_You're a man, buddy. Yeah, I know all about it. You're terrible at keeping secrets. You're shit at it._

And to this, Nagato replied, very sincerely: _Haven't you done all - ?_

And Yahiko didn't say a word, at first. Then, just: _Heh. Man, don't be dumb. Don't be dense with me._

He shook his head and put his hand on his kunai, holding onto it as if readying himself – which maybe he was. Preparing for what would come next.

_Look, I've never ... actually... had to kill anybody before. And I've – neveractuallybeenwithagirl._

And Nagato could think nothing more than that this was the strangest day of his life: on the eve of peace, with Hanzou waiting for them, and Yahiko speaking so bizarrely. So openly. It was discomfiting, to say the least.

_Yahiko, you're my best friend._

_No, don't get all sappy like that. I don't need pity. Don't go there._

And he laughed, but it sounded distant and sad, and scarcely like a laugh, at all.

_It's just. Y'know, I wanted to hate you, Nagato, for being such a dependent whiner. I wanted to hate you because you took all my ideas and didn't even come up with your own. And I wanted to hate you because everyone I loved always loved you best. Sensei. Konan. Every-fucking-body who mattered ... always loved you best._

Of course, Nagato denied it: insisted it wasn't true. That it was just a different kind of love.

_Nah, don't say that. Don't bother. You know better. We know better. They always loved you best. I always knew. But you know what gets me?_

The holes near their feet were filling.

Their toes and the wrappings on their calves had gotten soaked.

_What gets me,_ Yahiko said, _and don't take this the wrong way. 'Cause I don't mean it like that. But._

"I always loved you best, too."

But being beloved doesn't mean much.

What it means is what you stand to lose.

All of Jiraiya's words and all of Jiraiya's love and Konan's love and Yahiko's -

- and the love of his dead parents -

- doesn't save him.

And his love does not save them.

Maybe it dooms them, because Konan is screaming and crying like he's never heard her scream or cry before, and someone's blood is covering his palm: warm spill over his fingers, cramped cold on the weapon. And his best friend dead at his feet. Dead like everyone and everything, like where it all goes in the end.

_I'm sorry, sensei._

_I wanted to be what you saw in me._

Konan's screams are the last thing he hears before he goes under.

* * *

She hits the ground, softly, opens her eyes, and feels a wave of dull soreness.

Beside her is the body of the first person she met after her parents died.

The first friend of her own age (exactly her age; born on the same date).

The first child who was kind to her.

Who saved her, when she was alone.

Who is dead.

For her. And for them.

"Konan, hold onto Yahiko and stay down," Nagato tells her.

Konan does as she's asked.

His face looks sad and soft – vulnerable. Yahiko seems gentler with his eyes closed, with his features relaxed. His youth shines through, revealing what has always existed underneath their leader's fearless, carefree exterior. She holds him, and feels the warmth leach from his body. Thumbs the blood from his lips with her long fingernails.

"I'm sorry," she whispers, with her chin pressed to the crown of his head. "I'm so sorry."

She looks at Nagato, who is hurt, and all the sound seems so far away – the rage that rips souls and hearts and organs from their owners, that turns the rain red with gore; drowning out the noise of her small breaths. She thinks she tells him to stop, but then her heart is in her ears, and everywhere, people are dying and trying to kill, and the world is a swirl of chaos, and Yahiko is dead in her arms.

And Yahiko is gone.

And Nagato is gone, too.

Because when she was bound, she asked them – begged them – to leave her behind, and they did not listen.

They _did not listen_.

For the first time, Konan knows she is different.

Amid the suffering, the chaos, and shock, and loss, the words of a woman from another world and life twist through her mind.

_Maybe if I had had interest in myself,_ she thinks, dizzily, _then this wouldn't have happened._

But it's far too late for that now.

* * *

"I can't actually move, Konan," Nagato admits, afterwards.

Which makes sense, he supposes, because his spine is jammed with black rods; the fatty tissue has dissolved from his skin: sucked clean out by the jutsu, and they are - just the two of them now - situated on the flatlands below the crest of a hill, and a fresh garden of corpses has taken root all around them.

_Excruciating_ doesn't even begin to cover the pain, when it hits.

He would fall down, if he could, but the spikes anchor him: tear through skin and muscles and puncture the spinal cord so there are parts of him he can't move or feel any longer.

Such as his legs, which a moment ago were flaring with agony.

Now, they may as well not exist, for all that there's no sensation in them. He can look down enough to see their condition; between the exploding tags and the fat extraction, they look something like chicken bones when all the soft tissue has been boiled clean away. Steam curls upwards around the soles of his feet, and melted, smouldering flesh is peeling off in chunks.

But he can't feel them. Everything he _can_ feel, meanwhile, is pain. One big ball of pain.

"That was a stupid thing I did," he mutters, and then throws up.

And throws up again.

And again -

And by this time, his upper body sways enough from the nausea that he tilts, and he feels Konan catch him, and by this point, there's nothing left inside him and he can only dry-heave from the sheer rawness of his nerve endings, from the blistering misery of being so exposed. Spots are exploding all along his vision: all within the ripples of the rinnegan and through his blood vessels.

"That was a stupid thing you did," Konan agrees, sobbing, and wipes his hair from his face and holds him, and kisses his forehead. "Don't ever do anything like that again. Please. Promise me."

"I'm not sure - " he gasps " - I'll be in any condition to make it to an _again_. But I promise."

She looks at him disbelievingly.

Then shakes her head. "They're all dead, Nagato. They're all dead."

"Not _all_," he corrects. Regards her wearily out of his bleary eye.

"Don't worry about him. I'm safe now. We're - "

But she apparently can't complete the sentence. She just cries in that sniffling, suck-nose manner that he was once so accustomed to utilizing. It reminds him of a wounded animal, all that sniffling and trembling. Nagato has almost never seen Konan cry, come to think of it. Maybe he _never_ has, he realizes. Yet what he notices most is that it isn't full-throated; it's tiny and recoiling and pitiful. Kitten tears.

A wave of guilt shadows him, for contributing to those sounds of hers.

He wants to tell her he's sorry, but he's not. He doesn't regret anything.

It was a stupid thing to do, but it was the only way. He'd do it all over again. Right now.

He wants to tell her it was all for her, but it wasn't.

It wasn't all for her, and it wasn't all for Yahiko, and it wasn't all for himself or his ideals.

There were other factors. There was blood lust, pure and simple.

And he wants to tell her it will all be okay, but their best friend is dead, and their peace is destroyed before it began; their dreams have been laid to waste, or at least set back, and their group is scattered.

And she's holding him, who is crippled, and can't even walk.

So "it'll be all right" just doesn't cut it.

"It's not over," is the only solace he can give.

"Nagato - "

His eyes drift closed. "We're not going to die here. We're not going to waste his sacrifice."

"You should've left me behind."

"Konan, don't talk nonsense. We couldn't have done that and you know it." It's slightly aggravating, that she'd say that. Like that was ever an option. Like it could even be considered. She's sweet, but sometimes, Nagato thinks, she gets these confusing ideas. "Anyway, Yahiko died with his last words saying that we should survive by any means."

"I didn't think he'd do that," she whispers, and it's like she's not listening – like she hasn't heard a word. "Why did he do that? Why did you let him?"

She says it like she's only just realizing it, and maybe she is. Her tone is hushed; frenzied, and Nagato knows if he could turn to see her, her eyes would be wide with delirium: "He's _gone_, Nagato. He's not coming back."

_I would have chosen you,_ he almost tells her, but the words fail to escape, and there's only a groan of physical suffering as his ribs and face throb. The sense of betrayal in the thought, the feeling of heresy, is nerve-wracking in and of itself: they were so close, choosing one or the other would have been like a mother forced to choose one child to live and one to die.

For any of them. For her. For Yahiko, too.

I should've never had to choose – he thinks.

"I guess I have to be the leader, now," he says.

His tired eyes drag to the bloody body, and the pangs of sorrow begin to creep through the hurt and shock of it all. Memories and nostalgia for their childhoods seep into him, overlapping with memories of the deaths of his parents: it's like they've been slaughtered all over again. Like he failed all over again. Like he couldn't not fail. Like he just can't _not fail_, because the design of the world ensures that success is impossible. And Yahiko, who always dreamed big – who could make anything happen – is dead. Gone. Just wiped out.

_He's not coming back._

Nagato remembers the conversation from just before the world came crumbling down, and knows (of course, retrospectively) that Yahiko must have known he was going to die.

And he knows, also, why he made the choice to die.

But he decides not to breathe a word of it to Konan. There's no sense in making her feel worse.

And what's done is done.

What's done really is done.

"_Nagato_," Konan says, again, and now she sounds panicky and breathless. "How are we going to get anywhere? We can't... we can't move... I just... "

Because apparently the trauma of the carnage, and Yahiko's death, has subsided just enough for her to realize that they're completely alone, stranded in the middle of nowhere, with no one to help them, and Nagato's legs can't function. Nor can much of the rest of him.

"I'll make it, Konan," he assures. "Look, just... give me time. I'll think of a jutsu. It's what the rinnegan is for."

But she looks skeptical, of course, when he turns to her.

And completely heartbroken.

He sighs. "I need a new pair of legs."

And when the words leave his mouth, the abrupt, chilling idea accompanies them.

"I need a new pair of legs," he repeats, "and I know how to get them... I think. Konan, will you help me?"

"Of course I will."

"This is a big request," he insists, because her answer was so automatic, and she doesn't know yet. She just doesn't know, and the idea is so horrifying, but. "I'm sorry. It's a big request."

"What is it?"

"It's... these rods. They're in my spine, Konan. I'm no anatomy expert, but the spine is what lets a person move. If I could conduct my chakra - "

He frowns in concentration. " - if I could... maybe I could send the nerve signals out through these spikes. Send them into something else, and move it around."

"Like a machine?" she asks, innocently.

"Like a person."

"I don't understand."

He says, quietly:

"Please trust me."

* * *

It's a curious and perhaps selfish thought, but Konan wishes Nagato would cry. She's never told him, but she's always loved that he cried, and maybe a part of it is that she felt he was crying to make up for what she herself could not do. She didn't cry when her parents died. It wasn't because she had any steel in her, then. It was only that she could not cry. The water just wasn't in her. It wouldn't come. Gravity could not drag it from her eyes.

She was a wispy human being who grew up in aether and paper flowers and wandering about, dancing and dreaming and taking comfort in her friends. She grew up in Yahiko's rough embraces. She grew up with her fingers in Nagato's long hair, and her lips to his lips. Their joy supplanted her joy and their tears supplanted what she could not offer, and their dreams became her dreams, too.

Or, rather, she wanted them to be.

But she's a teenager now, and only lately coming to the realization that maybe their dreams were never her dreams: at least, not enough to sustain her. Not enough to drive her to become a valuable asset on their team. Not enough to make her take to the violent lifestyle – the warrior lifestyle, which her body has always despised. And if she'd understood this sooner, would Yahiko be alive? Would Nagato be so injured?

And this, finally, is what made her cry: her own smallness.

Because she is a very small person.

She once found a baby bird with a bent wing. She wanted it to fly. She took it in and fed it crumbs and its little chest puffed in and out, but after a few days, she came in and found it dead: a pile of feathers. Nothing more.

She almost cried, then. But she couldn't. She felt a tightness in her chest and stomach. She cupped the bird in her palms and carried it to Nagato, who looked down solemnly, and together, they buried it behind the house their sensei was using.

They buried so many things, because they were always trying to care for some piece of life.

But the bird, she knew, was herself. She was born with a bent wing.

And so was Nagato.

He got away from it, though. His maturation took him further from her, or so she's always worried, but he became someone; he really became someone amazing, in some ways. But as for herself? She's still a small person. She wanted to be one of those kunoichi you hear about who becomes a legend; she entertained such thoughts, sometimes. Being loud and drunk and punching a fist through a tree; well, there was glamour in that. But she couldn't be that. And maybe she didn't want it enough, or maybe she didn't have it in her. But she is, simply, a very small person. A fading person.

And she knows it's too late in life for this to ever change.

And yet, Konan wishes Nagato would cry, because Yahiko is dead. He's gone forever, but Nagato hasn't shed a tear, and this doesn't seem right. After the initial outburst which stunned and frightened her half to death, Nagato has been eerily calm – and that may be even more frightening. She knows him. She knows him better than anyone.

She may have even known him better than Yahiko did.

She can sense the cool rage that's radiating off him.

The funny thing is, she and Nagato have never said their "I love you"s. Not once during those years growing up together. They didn't say those words when she wiped his soggy cheeks. They didn't say those words when they first kissed, nor when they first made love. And they don't say them now.

It was understood when they buried the bird – when they looked down into the pit and were haunted by all the same memories, and the same experiences. It was understood when they spoke softly in the middle of the night, to one another, in their tent, while Yahiko snored nearby. It was understood in their touches.

They could not speak the words, because the words might give way to loss, and they - both of them - knew it too well, and were too afraid, so if they breathed those words aloud, they would surely die.

Konan knows they have been saying those words all this time.

She is saying them as she removes Yahiko's clothing – as she takes the black poles which have split off from Nagato and begins to refine them with the kunai that entered Yahiko's abdomen.

They say in war, in life, in near-fatal injuries, you will do anything to live: unspeakable things, and things that you cannot later conceive of yourself as having done. Konan and Nagato know this, because they remember some of what they ate on days when there was no other food, and they won't talk of it now.

Konan knows this is another instance of such a separation of the self from its pre-meditated outlook on day-to-day existence: because how could she do this?

She doesn't know with what strength she begins to insert the shaved off black metal into what was once Yahiko.

She does not cry, then, and she does not hurt, and she does not mourn for their friend any longer. She sets about the task – and sees it, in some sense, as a task – and cuts, and hones, and cuts, and hones, and punctures his arms.

Feels the flesh give before the harder substance.

Tears the cartilage of his nose as she slips the bars through it.

Konan has heard stories: men whose legs were hacked off abruptly, so they had to shove their hands into the sockets and bite down against the pain to quench the blood flow. Or people who, pinned down, had to cut off their own limbs to free themselves, to escape.

You ask: how can you do that? How can anyone do that?

And maybe the answer is only that sometimes, you have to.

She's always been told that she has such pretty, soft hands. She's always been told that she folded paper so intricately, with such attention to detail.

Her skilled hands – her fingers which give such attention to detail – are perfect for this.

For fitting everything together. For finding where to pierce the nerve endings.

In the lips, so he can speak. A slender bar through each ear, for hearing – and his voice guides her, directs her - _I think it'll work there, Konan_ - clipping and attaching fragments to the thin tissue.

And the stomach, which is smooth and flat – and where, for the only time, she hesitates, because it feels so cruel to drive these alien objects into him. The penetration, the violation of the body – it feels analogous to the fears a woman in a war zone lives with, but no, he is dead. She's not hurting him.

It feels like a desecration, when the stomach acid rises and she hears the body gurgle in a post-death paroxysm, and for a moment, horror seizes her.

Complete and utter horror: like they're going down a road straight to hell, for doing this.

And she's never been a superstitious girl.

"You're almost done, Konan," Nagato says, gently. His own arms dangle, spindly now, and his body is propped up, but hunched and almost doubled over, in spite of everything. He watches her out of one eye, and that eye has a pained, crazed look to it. But his voice remains even.

Disturbingly, perfectly even.

She finishes with the neck, with the legs, and then sometime – a world and a daze later, she hears Nagato telling her that he thinks this is enough, that it's all right now – and she moves aside, and he lifts his shaking hands.

And wracked by tremors that almost undo him and make each motion tedious and arthritic -

He forms hand signs.

* * *

When Nagato's eyes open on Yahiko's face, Konan feels the chill return to the base of her spine. There again is the sense that they are trespassing into a world of the forbidden: a world where mortals don't belong, and should they keep going, there's no turning back. But this was the only way. It was the only way for them to escape. It was the only way for Nagato.

He does not speak, at first. She helps him up in that body, because he appears disoriented, and stumbles, but that's to be expected. _Yahiko?_ she wants to say. _Nagato? Who are you?_ Even though she knows. Logically, she knows.

His first act, after dressing himself again, is to take the kunai from Konan's hand.

One stroke on his hitai-ate, one dragged slash, and the symbol he wears will never be the same.

Konan shrouds Nagato's real body in paper, because he says the double-vision is making him feel worse. She's careful with his open wounds, and he moans softly, but insists he will make it.

They return, all alone – just the two (three) of them – to their tent.

They do not talk, and they sleep through the night.

"Look this way when you speak to me," he says at about noon the following day, after she's tossed and turned all night in a hot sweat, with nightmares of burying Yahiko and of death and destruction and carnage fizzling over her subconsciousness.

She was certain she'd wake up and he would be alive again, and Nagato would be whole. If she closed her eyes tightly, then opened them -

But the silhouette with the orange hair in the doorway does not belong to the right person.

She looks down at her hands, and shivers, and it is like a dream when he pads over to her and takes her hands in his. And leans close, so he's breathing in her hair.

"I just can't seem to wake up," she hears herself say, weakly, but the prickle of his mouth when his kisses nip her is very real.

_We need to bury Yahiko,_ she keeps almost saying, because she keeps feeling like there's a Yahiko to bury somewhere – some deed gone unfinished. Because she and Nagato are used to burying things, and burying them together, and so they must go out now, and find Yahiko, and bury him.

But Yahiko isn't dead, because how can he be dead? He's standing right here. He must have never died. "Where is Nagato?" she asks. "And where did Yahiko go?"

"You have a fever, Konan," says some person whose hand presses to her forehead. "The rain's made you sick."

"I think we have to see Hanzou today. Where is _Nagato_?"

And she starts to cry. Really cry. Horrible sobs that quake her entire body, and she feels that embrace of that person who is not either of her friends, and Yahiko's voice speaking a tone he'd never use, and it makes her cry to hear it – the wrongness of it all. Because some things just aren't meant to exist in this world, and Yahiko should not be speaking Nagato's words.

She does not struggle as he removes her cloak, and goes limp as he lays her down on their sleeping bag, and lies down beside her. She feels like her body will split into paper seams, and she feels like a hand is reaching up between her ribs and squeezing her insides.

"I'm still getting used to this jutsu," he tells her, "and I'm still in pain. I'm no good for doing anything right now."

He's still not a right fit in this body, in his words – this body: as if, whose body is it, really? As if: don't talk about Yahiko like that, but there is no Yahiko. But how can Nagato behave as if there is no Yahiko? And why aren't you crying, whoever you are? She wants to ask. But he keeps talking very pragmatically about his body's wounds, and bodies, and wounds, and how he has to recover before they can make their move.

And gradually, as she begins to relax into another fever-sleep, Konan realizes by and by that Nagato is especially traumatized.

Before or after a particularly intense, sharp pain, there's sometimes a moment in which you can talk very calmly during the stunned instant while the pain is setting in. It's different with a persistent, nagging headache, but the worst injuries can sometimes knock the wind from you and reduce you to perfect, point-blank clinical clarity or numb, hazy mumbling.

So he talks quite methodically about how they must go on to continue Yahiko's dreams, and how they're alive, and about this body, and this jutsu – all in very mechanical language, like everything is just a machine – and how she needs her rest and he needs his, and his eyes and muscles are still adjusting.

And she, shaking so badly, manages to reach up and run her fingernails through his hair and across his neck, and kiss him, all the same, and assure that she's with him, and it doesn't matter what form, because he's still him, and they'll carry their losses, and when the time comes, she will go with him to _Amegakure no Sato._

"And we will bury Yahiko together."

As they are doing.

As they are doing.

* * *

**notably:** I'll be honest; the first part of this chapter was damned hard to write, because turning that much sheer Crazy into a coherent 'fic scene is challenging. "Nagato goes nuts and HOWLS AT THE MOON" does not an easy fic incarnation make. So I skimmed it a little; if you read chapter 447, you have a good visual image there of what Konan and Nagato were going through. I, for the purposes of this 'fic, mentioned the carnage in passing more so as to shift the focus to their feelings and their grief.

I do love some Nagato/Konan fluff... after, you know, a ton of bloodshed, horror, death, wtf-ery, and violence. Fluff is the least they need, man. I guess this fic would probably technically fit the "hurt/comfort" genre, at times.

On the issue of the body switch: It's hard to know how they would react to this, because I think they'd be so traumatized it'd be hard to really settle on one reaction. We know that in the later canon, Nagato and Konan don't seem to regard Yahiko's body AS Yahiko anymore (since, well, really, he's not); they seem very detached in that respect. But how did they feel initially? Aside from confused and disturbed? It's kind of a lot to take in. I imagine they were overwhelmed, which is the feeling I was going for here.

One or two more parts until the 'fic is completed. There's still porn to be porn'd and Akatsuki to form, and yeah. Cheers! Hope you will stay tuned for more.


	3. a terrible beauty

**Chapter 3: a terrible beauty**

* * *

**Title:** Shards of the dying sun.**  
Genre:** Angst/tragedy + romance + general.**  
Characters/Pairing:** Pain (Nagato) x Konan**  
Rating:** R (M).**  
Warnings:** Violence and sexuality.** HEED PLZ.****  
Disclaimer:** Don't own Naruto. I really wish I owned Pain and Konan, though, just so I could save them from the fail that canon ultimately beset upon them.

+ a big thank-you to everyone who looked over this chapter in advance for me. You know who you are.

* * *

"It's a jutsu," he tells her.

Massages his eyelids on the eyes which still aren't right in this face.

"Are you in pain?" she asks.

"Delirious with it."

"Oh."

"It's a jutsu," he repeats. "Like the statue. Nothing more extreme. I'm still me."

"I know," she says. Adds: "Nagato."

"It was the only way."

Konan sits on a stool in the corner, with her hands folded in her lap. There is mud and rainwater in her hair, on her skin. It's dying to clay in the grooves of her palms and caking the slim tissue between her fingers. The mud has gotten under her cloak; it's all over her chest and thighs, and across the soles of her feet. Her sickness is fading. She and Nagato slept. They cooked their dinner. They ate in silence. They are alone. And she has no energy, but she refuses to lie back down: she's been making busy with cleaning the pots and tending the evening fire.

Sleep isn't helping. They can both agree on that.

Konan, at least (Nagato seems to have a renewed liveliness, and he's pacing), feels like she could lie down and sleep the remainder of her life away, but that's the problem: it's too embracing, sleep. It feels like too much heavy nothingness. It's the sensation of being smothered beneath gauze or drowning in a pool of warm water, and she wakes aching and miserable and drained, full of phantom thoughts.

When she kneels down and peels the top of the paper shroud aside, she feels him watching her from behind. She can see the bones through his skin; could count his ribs, if she lifted his clothing.

He looks out at her from one eye; hair obscures the other.

She wants to rip that paper aside and get a look at what's left of his legs.

"We're going to Amegakure no Sato tomorrow."

His lips are broken.

"How do I look to you right now?" she asks.

"Better than I look to you," he says, and coughs, through a mouthful of phlegm.

She props him up, and he coughs; twists himself enough so that he coughs towards his shoulder. Sucks his breath and clears his throat. His exhalations are harsh and laboured, shaking his now worn frame.

"Cover your eye," he tells her, and she hesitates, but does so.

He holds his fingers up. Very close to her face, so he's nearly touching her nose.

She counts the seconds, and at ten: "The other one, now."

And at ten again, she uncovers them. "Unfocus," he says, and his fingers blur.

She's done this trick before, as a girl, with her own fingers, or near objects before her eyes – during moments of rest, lazily staring at whatever was in her field of vision.

"If you focus, it will become clear," Nagato says, "but close one eye, then the other, and you see you're getting two different things. That's the only example I can begin to give you."

That's just it: his eyes take him to a place she cannot understand, mentally or emotionally. She cannot – no one else can – know how it feels to look at the world from two sets of eyes. She cannot know the mysteries of what those supposedly-legendary eyes must see. It is akin to a language which she cannot speak, and never will. And it makes her feel far from Nagato, all these pieces of him she cannot touch, but here he is, unnervingly cool against her hands.

They are alone.

It comes to her, as she's examining his injuries: they are alone.

"It's just like before," she murmurs. "Everything is gone."

Starting over, like all those years ago.

"You need to wash off," says his other voice, from the opposite side of the room, in that way which sends the shivers up her spine.

She does not turn. But Nagato succeeds in convincing her (it does not take much), and he heats the water buckets, wrestles her from her robe, and helps her into the metal basin they have been using for a tub. She sinks down: feels like she could pleasantly melt, and the heat washes into her sinuses and she feels open and the sadness begins to pour inside once more. Nagato soaps her and runs his fingers through her hair, which she washes fitfully, as the water turns brown.

And then she stands up, shivering, as he pours another bucket – cooler this time – and dumps it down her, rinsing the remainder of the muck away. She trembles, and towels off, and afterwards, he assumes her former position on the stool, with his chin in his fists, and she sits with her back propped against the wall and looks up at him, blinking slowly. He thumbs her lashes.

_We were trained for this,_ she thinks. Trained by Jiraiya-sensei. Trained in the organization. Trained by life: War is hell. It's true.

And shinobi do not show their feelings.

"I'm going to pour one for myself, now," he says.

"How does it feel?" she asks, lifelessly. "Is the pain beginning to ebb? Does it hurt in – that body?"

She turns away when he undresses. She doesn't mean to, but her own body takes the initiative.

"It disperses the feeling," he answers. "There's more of _me_ now."

Gradually, she turns a little. Then a little more. Until she's looking at him: in the mix of light from the candles and stars. The patches around the black chakra-conducting inserts are red, as if blistered; his hair is matted and plastered to his forehead by sweat, and his eyes are foggy and tired – probably matching her own.

"Do the piercings hurt?"

"No," he says, "those are where the sensations are coming in. Those may as well be my nerve endings, now. But this body does hurt."

He looks down. She follows his gaze – to where a fatal-looking cut runs clean along his abdomen. It will always be there, now: someday, a long, brownish-pink, faded scar - where the skin will grow hard and rise upwards.

"To save us," she whispers.

"Another casualty of war," he says.

_Don't talk about him so coldly_, she thinks. Doesn't say. Her insides are knotting up with memories, with the sound of her friend's voice – the tone and the laughter which is now lost to her – him always at their sides, for years, growing tall beside them, and suffering beside them, and keeping them secure and on the straight path. How many times did they each think – each say to themselves – that it was good they had Yahiko?

"I'll miss his laughter, most," she says, without really thinking.

Because she and Nagato never laughed, otherwise. Only when he goaded them to it.

She'll miss his laughter, and his smiles: which will never return.

"Everything dies," Nagato says. "Birds and plants. Dogs. Parents. Friends."

His voice is not like Yahiko's; it is hard-edged and full of ice chips.

"He was with us, and talking to me. And then he was against me, and falling, and his blood was on my blade, and covering my hands. That's how life works for us, Konan."

Her back presses into the wall, and she raises her hands to her mouth; bites down on her broken nails. She cried, earlier, but now once more, the water is frozen inside of her. She is as dry as the paper she folds, and the pain comes and goes in waves.

"That's how it is in war. We know that now," Nagato says.

And Konan remembers all the little lives they tried to save: the flowers that wilted and the bird with the broken wing – the puppy which followed Nagato and wagged its tail when he offered it bread. She remembers those distant losses from a time back when they could scarcely speak to convey what they felt, and they could not name or know their loss: they knew only that they had been someone's children, and then they were not.

Konan does not even remember her mother's and father's faces, nor the shades of their hair. She cannot look into them, in her memory, and find herself; nor can she look into the mirror and find _them_.

At least Yahiko and Nagato had been able to remember those whom they came from.

All Konan remembers, from her first years, are the blue flowers which used to grow where she lived, and which died.

All of her life, she has been folding paper in her hands in the hopes of re-making them. Holding onto them.

"They're going to come after us." Her throat is parched. "Nagato, you know they probably will."

She does look. She watches with wide, transfixed eyes that come into focus – as the water runs all down the naked flesh, and he soaps himself, and the faintest hair of a wince twists his face at the feel of the lye on his (his? Whose?) fresh marks.

"Perhaps," he agrees. "If they haven't come to the conclusion that we've died. But we're going to them before they can."

"What do you have in mind?"

His breathing heaves his chest, and his own eyes look like they did the night in the sorghum fields, when he had had too much to drink.

"Finishing what we started."

It's no surprise: she sensed it shortly after Yahiko died. Nagato's words, then – and the hints he's been dropping, since; the implications of it all. She can hear the cold, calcified fury that's been leaking through his detached tone, and she remembers, like a nightmare, those horrible sounds and that terror as the blood flowed, and all around her, humans screamed and died. It was muted by the shock, by losing Yahiko, and his warm body in her arms, and her cheek to the crown of his head, but -

She remembers.

He rinses himself, and his hand comes down on the edge of the basin, and Konan thinks he looks like he wants to just tear the tin to pieces.

He could, too. Nagato really could.

"I'm tired of living like this, Konan. So we're not going to, anymore."

* * *

Coming home to a ragged _tent_ -

Cleaning yourself with lye soap and hard water that's almost as dirty as you – that scrubs off your skin in flakes, even as it scrubs off the dirt -

No running water, and no certain meals, and growing up eating things you'd rather forget -

That's life in a war zone. No orphanages, no. No adults. Begging, you get used to that: you lose your shame in a hurry. And then you mourn for your shame, but only after you've managed to feed yourself at last. And the loss: everything is transitory. Parents go, and every other organic thing does.

Dreams die, and so do dreamers.

And everything you think you've held onto all these years to make for yourself a happier future?

It's all a lie. There are no answers; not here.

And Nagato decides he's had enough.

Jiraiya told him: _I think you have to find your answers for yourself_.

And he agrees: but not any answers Jiraiya probably would've sided with.

Yahiko said: _I'm going to end war. I'm going to become God of this world._

And he's dead.

He's dead, and that's how death is curious. He was there, with them all these years, and now he's gone. Taken out of the picture. Erased. And, thanks to Nagato, a number of others were erased right along with him.

It's a funny thing, an impossible thing: that feeling like your heart is swelling up with hope, and then. Just.

Nothing.

Because -

Nagato's heart had been swelling. Jiraiya-sensei had given him hope. And Yahiko had given him hope. Yahiko's dream had sustained him, and his sensei's words - the power inside of him, and the insistence that that power _meant something_, and the insistence that a will towards a positive future meant something: yes, he had believed. The world could be changed. The small Rain Country could be saved. _He_ could be saved. It could happen.

He read everything he could get his hands on during the years following his sensei's departure. He was one of the few orphans who was fortunate enough to remember _how_ to read, and this made him especially valuable to Yahiko's organization. Nagato knew things about the world. He knew things about the Great Nations. Even if he preferred not to take on a leadership position, he was valuable to the cause.

And his heart had been filling up. There would be peace. He would have a real home. A roof over his head: an _actual_ roof – not tarp that the rain would drench through. He could tell everyone the truth about himself, and Konan, and marry her, finally. Give her stability, too.

He had not forgotten about the relationship, unspoken and unplanned as it was, but there was so much else to sort through. She understood.

And what happened?

Jiraiya_-sensei_ abandoned them to die. Yahiko is dead. The organization is gone. And his body? There's no undoing the damage. He'll live in pain for the remainder of his life, but there was no other way. And that's what Nagato finds his mind hanging up on: there was _no escape_.

All of the answers he had sought? Didn't accomplish a thing.

The reading? Meant nothing.

The hope? Wasted.

And he and Konan have their lives, but how do you even _begin_ to pick up the pieces when your lives are almost _all_ you have?

(Even the face in the mirror is not right; is not his.)

Crippled and living on some disgusting life support system: that's all this is. Life support.

So they can lick their wounds and curl in pain, in misery, and shame.

So the guilt, remorse, and _hatred_ can burn them away -

- when there's no solution, and no path to resolution, and no one to lash out at -

And Nagato decides he's had enough.

* * *

"If I have more bodies, I can be invincible," he says at the dawn of the next day.

Konan gives him a weary look, but says nothing. They pack up, and she packs _him_ up, and together, they depart. They leave their meager belongings, and they do not look back. They will not look back. They will not be returning.

"We could die," she says. "This is like walking through death's door."

He knows. He voices this. But between dying, or continuing to live like trash, there is no choice.

The choice has been made for them.

Maybe it was taken out of their hands the moment Yahiko's life was, and the moment their own lives were tossed aside – Nagato used to bring about a means to an end; a tool of war, and Konan a hostage – shame, always shame. Remorse, and rage at nothing. At everything.

It's the helplessness that's killing him, so he resolves not to be helpless.

They walk for ten miles - as their canteens drop to the ground, empty.

Fifteen and Konan is panting slightly, but she looks like she's trying not to. _Remember your training_, Nagato tells her. _Remember your chuunin exams?_

"I remember," she says.

Twenty and she's looking worse for wear, and the sun is passing on in the sky, and it's almost evening already. They have been walking all day, through the hills and valleys and crags.

"Now," he says, and she lifts her hands, and scatters.

They've saved all their chakra for this.

And when he lifts his hand, and the gates to Amegakure bend – bend, bend – until they tear off their hinges, and metal rips and screeches and blows into the air -

Paper gusts into the airflow.

He walks inside.

* * *

It's the feeling of being disembodied that's frightening.

Like you could blow asunder at any moment.

Or, in this country, as if the rain could wash you away.

But there is no rain: he's seen to that, somehow. The sky is clouded and ominous.

And it doesn't feel like herself, and it's easy enough to think it's not herself, because herself is all over the place, and herself is coming together as she watches, from her forming eyes, and twists her hand, as the paper covers a mouth and a face and she hears – feels, from those spider-webbed non-nerves that connect each sheet – a body suffocating, gurgling and drowning into itself, and thrashing.

It thrashes for too long, and then it's still, and all she can see is the band around its head with the four slashes like those she once wore.

Sheets twist, become fingers, and her hands become fists by her sides, with her fingernails digging into her palms, reminding her that the skin is there, and she can dig to the blood – if she wants.

She looks down.

Wills the paper to curl away, and the dead eyes stare at her without reproach. Blue. The face is nondescript. But young, like hers. Could be her age – and Yahiko's. A mess of freckles, and chapped lips. Soggy black hair.

_No_, she thinks, and squeezes her cloak at the chest; bunches the fabric against her sternum: _No, there's nothing there. It's all empty._

"End your jutsu," Nagato yells from somewhere under the sky, and the wind almost blows the words away. "I'm going to light the city."

"Do you want me to stay with your body?" she asks, or thinks she does -

- must have -

- because he replies: "Hide it."

When she gets to Nagato, he feels too light in her arms. But she lifts him. Cradles him, and everything is exhaustion and air and weightlessness as she makes her way through the updraft and up the base of a tower, where, gasping, she lays him down on one of the overhanging stones – where so much metal is twisting down at her, with faces and eyes and tongues and teeth.

Amegakure.

It must be heaven.

Or hell. Some place in their stories. Some afterlife.

Konan is looking up into a demon's face, looking down into hers.

Nagato coughs.

Someone is yelling behind her as the next gravity pulse crushes the rocks, and if she turns, she'll see him crunching bones on a skull or with a hand underfoot – with the fingers smashing, bending backwards, or popping down into the pits. Battle is noise. She reaches forward; frees more of Nagato, and he slumps, tilts his head. Then looks forward, and over her shoulder, and past her: very alert, and says, "I'm going to concentrate."

The fires cut the last word off at "tra-". Konan cringes.

Nagato's head falls, but she can see his eyes are still open. He's dragging the breaths in.

Konan turns.

Turns back to the chaos: doesn't know what possesses her to do it.

There's Amegakure, orange with the flames whose heat has been licking up her spine, and she runs, runs, past the slick streets, and over the pockmarks, beyond the straw huts dissolving, and through and under the smoke that trickles down her throat, into her lungs: burns. Coughs, and her eyes are watering, and there is some dying body groaning, begging _please, help_ through a mouth of blood – and somewhere some cans of oil and tar and pitch and everything have been torched; have been smashed with a gravity well and have felt the _tensei_ - the chakra; his – and the sky is full of cawing, fleeing birds, and the horses and mules almost trip her up.

As she chases the wraith through the streets.

Where he goes, where the flames make him glow orange, and shine on all his metal parts, and shine on his eyes – reflected off some broken window like liquid metal.

Come back, come back, come back.

(I helped make you.)

And her feet in the puddles, and people shoving her, and he's moving up ahead; ahead, parting crowds – waves of them – tossed through the air. Through shattering windows. Clearing a path. As if his feet aren't even on the ground, barely touching, and Konan just can't scream over all the sound, but the words are catching inside of her, anyway. So beyond the swarm, past the sidewalks and cobbled streets – and the lights are glowing in the evening sky, and she's never been beneath lights like these before.

Beautiful blue and green and red lights, flashing. Like insects.

The tower rushes up onto her; onto them – appears from nowhere, from beyond the throngs of vanishing humans and animals and buildings, and then the guards are charging: thrown back, crushed into the pavement. He's over the threshold, and fifty feet behind, so is she.

Konan runs.

* * *

He finds his mark on the third floor.

They are having a meeting. A dinner party of clients: ladies in perfume and dresses and food on the table the likes of which he's never been able to eat, not a day in his life, and men appareled in the armour and raiments of high society. Waiting. Just arrogantly waiting, while their city has burned. Waiting, he thinks, like people who never lose. Who never even consider that they could lose.

And, oh - the looks on their faces when they turn to the doorway.

Like they've seen a ghost.

"Yahiko," Hanzou says.

"Didn't you say you were tired of looking at my face?"

Nagato does not smile.

Hanzou looks him in the eyes. Then, his own eyes narrow. "You -"

A wave of his hand, and those in uniform around him charge – and there's a rain of blades, but he repels them, easily. Crashes through, and bounds across the table – across the room to where "Salamander" Hanzou is making another run for it: already has the hands raised, but this time, the five seconds are up in time for Nagato to grab him with his _other_ jutsu, which pulls the much larger man up against him.

So they're face to face.

To face to face to face.

So he can smell, nearly taste, the sweat that's draining down his face beneath the heavy clothes; beneath the improbable device. So he can feel the shivers that belie the rigid attention and fearlessness of shinobi training.

He won't scream, but that's all right.

Nagato tightens his grip on his collar.

And he looks around the room, at the faces of the others in attendance; stunned and hesitant and uncertain, dazed and bleeding their fear into his atmosphere, and he can feel it over his skin like electricity, like the coming of a storm. The coming of rain. And thunder. And in that moment, the world is perfectly clear.

It's all so perfectly clear.

"Pray," he says, quietly. "For God's mercy. For mine."

* * *

Drops the body, and drops a black rod from his coat sleeve.

And then the quiet ends, and the blows begin.

Until the device is broken.

And the teeth break out.

And the nose smashes into the face.

Until there is very little left of the face.

Until the head is blood, and pulp.

It's only a matter of a minute.

And then he looks calmly – at the rod.

Dripping, as it is, with human remains.

His gaze shifts to the next person in line.

* * *

Konan wakes slowly. Stretches and yawns; rubs the sleep from her eyes, and lets the dreams subside in their fitful manner. She is sore, but not as sore as she feels she should be, and when she realizes that she is indeed _waking up_ from a slumber, she sits upright in a start and pats the surface beneath her.

It's not a sleeping bag. She's not on a tatami mat, or on the ground in a tent.

There are sheets, and blankets, and an ornate covering of gilded markings smoothing across rumpled fabric of an expensive-looking red. And pillows. There are actually pillows. The feeling of being cushioned among so many soft, alien objects makes her feel curious. Memories that are not memories – sensations from another lifetime: a little girl in a bed - and she can almost feel the comb dragging through her broken hair.

"I found you outside the door of the dining room on the third floor."

That voice again. She doesn't think she'll ever grow accustomed to it. But there it is: _Nagato_, yes, at the window. With his hands folded behind his back. And the sunlight is falling through the beams of the window, such that his feet rest on squares of gold, and all the shades of orange-auburn in his hair are visible.

And it's just like Yahiko, but really, nothing like Yahiko, in the least amount.

"You must have passed out from fatigue."

"I did."

Then: "What happened last night?"

"Well," he says, "the revolution has come and gone."

Fidgets, and he's still facing away from her, and the way he wears his hitai-ate, and the way it pushes and shapes the flow of his hair: from behind, there is no difference. But the body is stiff and languid and contemplative.

"A terrible beauty has been born."

"What if someone attacks us?"

"There are no shinobi guards left to attack us within this city, and if by some miracle a few survived, they will be easy enough to dispatch. It is ours."

She climbs from the bed. Feels back in her body, once more. Like nothing from last night or the past few days has been real. There's soreness, but also the warm assurance of feet on carpet – real carpet – and a roof over her head, with the elements locked outside, for a change, and when she nears Nagato, she can feel the daylight on her skin. You're alive. Yes, I am. Yes, we are.

And they've won this round.

And for now, they are safe.

She can see her fragmented reflection in the glass. Her cloak is torn, and the motes of light filter through her, pure white. Her current flower is ruined with dirt. Likewise, her hair runs in wild disarray, and her shadow is smeared.

His eyes take in the sight of her in the glass, and just as she meets them and turns her attention towards _his_ reflection, he moves to face her.

"I told you, Konan. We're not going to live like trash. Not anymore."

The window is half-open. The air smells cool, like it does after the rain has come.

And for the first time in many many sunrises and sunsets, her hands reach out.

Her long fingers spread, and the sun slides between them; fills up her eyes, and behind her eyelids, and then his hands find hers.

Their bodies find their way back into the bed, into the tangle of sheets and pillows and the soft territory of foam and springs, and his lips are on her lips. Finally. Finally. She could cry, from the sweet relief, and it doesn't even matter, then, what he looks like, because Nagato is Nagato, and she feels Nagato under his skin; in the flex of the muscles on his face, and its tautness. Tastes Nagato in the movement of the lips broken by metal.

"I thought I'd lost you both," she murmurs between kisses, and the gentle press of tongues. "I was so worried."

It is the first time she has admitted it: aloud, or to herself.

_Don't scare me like that again._

The world is becoming a heap of cinders; or it already has become one, but it does not matter. It may matter later. It does not matter _now_.

Konan found him, years before, after losing herself, and she wants nothing more than to bathe in closeness and be held against what lies beyond these walls.

His hand pushes her hair from her forehead. Knocks the flower away. She opens her cloak. Slides her panties to her ankles and kicks them to the floor. Nagato is breathing hard, in that body. _Have you even gotten any sleep?_ she wonders. Does not ask.

Lays her back, and his hands take hold of first one boot, then the other. Removes them.

Konan catches herself gasping as his hands flatten her to the bed. So her own hooded, dreamy eyes are caught staring up at his intense ones, staring down at her.

There's an aggression in him – a _force_ - she's never experienced in their previous encounters.

As he kisses his way down her navel, and bites and nips and licks mark the path, she spreads herself, and they meld together when his hands shakily cup and massage her breasts, and she arches, and his lips and tongue work against her swollen clit.

Konan arches; buries her fingers into hair: that's the wrong texture, and -

Squeezes her pelvis, so she's tight almost to the point of pain when his fingers push in.

Squeezes and pushes, rhythmically, and shudders with a jolt as he flattens his tongue over her.

Konan just keeps ignoring the hair that's in her fingers that feels wrong, as metal scrapes her, tickles, and she feels her thighs shake as she pulls herself open, as he works himself against her - like digging, like chipping her to pieces, and she winds tighter, and she can see her breasts rising, pillowed on her chest, perfect points of her hard nipples, which fingers tweak and roll hard enough to leave pink-red in their wake.

And the bones and joints of his own killing fingers find something – aroused and swollen inside her, she does not know the part's name, as she pushes downdowndown, and the wet sounds; the sharp movement on the pulsing, over-sensitized lips, up to the clit, which throbs as his tongue curves against it. Throbs, until -

"_Nagato,"_ she cries out.

One hand in his hair, the other gripping the sheets; nails in so deep like she's trying to shred them.

Like she's trying to hold on for her life.

Konan comes, her back a perfect bow.

Coming, for her, is: when your body goes so tense that all the muscles contract.

Contract, and contract, until you're nothing _but_ a hot, writhing coil. Until it's all hard and stiff and spasming the tension out. Rolling, pressing it from the inside out, until it's gone.

And then you just _inhale._

Inhale the sunlight, and the rain, and the scent of fabric and dust and pollen.

Afterwards, he pulls his body across her slick skin, climbs the length of the bed, so his weight is pressing down on her, and she yanks at his clothing, such that soon both of their robes are spread out beneath them.

"Where are you?" Konan asks between kisses.

He knows what she means: "My body is taken care of. I'll show you, later."

It's good enough for now, when his eyes are making her feel wild, and her skin is ready: all the nerves feel hot, and close to the surface. When they are both completely divested of any coverings, and skin is on skin is on skin, her fingertips fall over the piercings in his forearms and she has a brief and crazy thought, like: _This isn't right, because this body is - _

And the memories start to rise, to choke, but she bites them back, and watches the ceiling, and lets him spread her: wide, with the strength of his chakra drumming in her ears. Vibrating through. Through. Through.

He could pull her apart.

But he does not, and will not.

Trembles, as she feels _(oh)_ his erection against her, where she's now perfectly wet, and prepared, so the tip brushes her clitoris; rubs in slow, deliberate circles. Konan slips her fingers into her mouth.

Bites down at the sound of his hiss.

"Go on," she whispers. "Go on."

Sits at an angle, with a hand sliding down and massaging a pillow, and one of his hands covers hers, and her eyes widen, widen, widen at the sight of his body sliding into her body, where she can look down past the flatness of her belly and the teardrop swirl of a navel, to where she's open and glistening on his skin which is glistening and _pinkredruddy_. Flesh. So much. Between her. Sliding into her.

Inside. Inside. Through folds, and walls.

Penetration.

Easy enough, when she's slick.

Konan contracts; squeezes instinctively.

(even though it's not the right size; is a little longer, and a different shade, and she's only let one person in here before, but it's the same person, it must be, it must be, and her eyes are transfixed on the sight of _him_ going into _her_)

- filling her -

She squeezes again. Moans, and pants, as his grip over hers becomes just shy of crushing.

It won't crush. Pressure, but not pain.

And suddenly, there's a sense of wrongness, of _horrible_ wrongness that sinks in the pit of her stomach, and Konan just gasps, and gasps; breathes in heavily through her nose, so she's shuddering, and says, "_Please._ Move."

Looks at his face, where droplets of moisture bead on his temples and his lips are open, just barely, and his exotic eyes appear to be focused somewhere else, in some daydream somewhere, but he's staring intensely at her. The morning blazes him, and he looks like nothing human. Nothing human.

Like -

"Move," she entreats. "_Fuck._"

The word she knows from the years before she could sleep on a bed like this, and the memories are back, washing through, but then his hands hold hers above her head, and their mouths crash together again, as their bodies crash together, as _she_ crashes into the pillows, into the cover and sheets and mattress; she curls a leg over his shoulder – slips it down his back, and bends her toes to stroke his skin.

As he moves over her. In her.

The rocking rhythm. Konan closes her eyes. Quivers internally at the feel of metal pieces. Stroking viciously - hot-and-cold.

The friction is almost unbearable.

(and it's all wrong, wrong, wrong)

Meld together: sinews, muscles dragging down her abdomen, so the signal of him vibrates through her, and his thrusts are slow, powerful, and it's like a force of nature – like a storm, or a tensei jutsu, and she can hear him swallowing his own gasps, even as he swallows hers: and his low, eventual moans (which she _feels_ more than _hears_), as everything begins to shake, and she shakes, and she hears her name.

Says: "I'm here. I'm here."

Once more.

The world collapses into noise.

It's not all right.

* * *

It's _not_ all right, when Konan looks at him afterwards, and thinks: _That's Yahiko. I'm not supposed to _do -

Leaves him lying face down on the bed, unaware, as she runs to the adjacent bathroom. Presses her hands to her cheeks, and blinks, and squeezes her eyes shut, as four days of memories are suddenly bearing down on her. A lifetime of memories. The three of them. Her "brother" is dead. He's dead. Really. She paces. Paces like if she walks back and forth, the grief will drain out.

Drain out: she glances at the shower, at where water runs like a luxury she's never had.

And all she feels is dirty.

And all she knows is dirty.

Konan can't even name it, now, or think it, or explain what she just did. What they've done.

She grabs at the faucet.

So there's a nice stream of water running in the background, _swish-swishing_ as she sits, nude, on the toilet, and lowers her head. Cradles it with her forearms, and _hums_.

I'm not ready to let him go, she thinks.

I'm not ready to let either of you go.

Birth control. She thinks of what's in her, because of what and who he _was_.

Feels a wave of nausea. Suppresses it.

There are jutsu for prevention. The older women in the organization taught her these.

Even so.

And she just keeps seeing Nagato's eyes, and Yahiko's face, and the blood running down his mouth, and feels the sticky coating on her body of her release, and his release, and the shaking, thundering, of sex and battle and knives and dying things and noise, and days' worth of being hollow, of being like paper around nothing: and anger, for being held hostage. For being pinned, and threatened. Used. Used against them, like garbage. And years and years ago, running with them, sleeping alongside them, and him bringing her into that cave, and teasing her, and giving her things, and petting her hair.

And her petting Nagato's hair.

She just wants to scream.

At the people who tormented her.

At the country which orphaned her, and left her with no past. And no parents she came out of.

At Yahiko, for _leaving her_.

At Nagato, for hurting himself. For _scaring her_.

At both of them, for not listening to her.

Nobody ever listens anymore.

She's furious.

Konan realizes: She really is. Furious.

She catches her body seizing up, but doesn't let anything come of it; flips the faucet off and treads over to the shower. Turns it on. The spray is cold.

_I need fresh air,_ she thinks, because it's like she can't get enough.

Like the high summer, when humidity bears down on her.

Flings the window open and sticks her head out. Takes in a whiff, and it feels good. Relaxing. Yes, that's it. So relaxing. Needs this.

So Konan takes in another deep lungful, and then a third, and a fourth, until she's nearly laughing herself silly from it all.

Then.

Notices, far below:

Water gushes down the pipes. She can hear its gurgle. Can see it splashing across the statues, down the storm drains and into the system of Amegakure. There has been a recent rain – a hard rain, befitting the country, and the waterways and channels run high, beneath her window.

And in what passes for a sewer, there float bodies.

Mangled, and staining the water red.

"I had to dispose of them, somehow," she hears him say, behind her.

Wonders how long he has been watching.

"Do you think I went too far, Konan?"

And for the first time, it becomes real to her.

Really real:

This is their life, now.

These are their lives.

Here.

"No," she answers, and means it. "You didn't."

* * *

**notes:** "A terrible beauty is born" - Yeats, "Easter, 1916", referring to the Irish rebellion; yeah, I'm a modernist-whore. What ya gonna do.

Weird, disoriented chapter, for weird, disoriented, traumatized characters. Yeah, it ended up making Nagato and Konan look pretty bizarre. Well, I think they are pretty bizarre. And it is uncertain as to how they would react to the trauma of having lost Yahiko, having _re-animated_ Yahiko (as Nagato, naturally), uh, killing goddamned everything, and conquering a city, and continuing their relationship in a rather different and more disturbed form. And then the psychological violation of the body-switch. Yap. It was emotionally rough territory to address, but strangely, I don't feel I've ever seen a Pain/Konan 'fic which ADDRESSED it (including my own efforts). DUDE, THAT IS YAHIKO'S CORPSE. That couldn't have been just like, o hai, it's ALL OKAY, lol. She did grow up with this guy. I don't think any amount of mental gymnastics can - at least, initially - stave off the feeling of, omfg, did I just have sex with my dead platonic bff? (Time will tell if that feeling goes away, though.)

Written to the song inspirations of "A Fine Frenzy" (check out their whole discography; great stuff), and Regina Spektor, particularly "Blue Lips". The take-over of Amegakure no Sato was written to "Supermassive Blackhole", by Muse.

More to come. I haven't even gotten to the formation of Akatsuki, yet - so natch, there shall be more.


End file.
